Photo by LiebeGaby

You spend two years of your life developing characters and then one day, one of them turns round and says

“This isn’t who I want to be.”

It’s a bit of a shock.

But I was surprised when a secondary character, destined to fade between the lines once they had served their purpose, came to me and showed me who she really was.

Everything about her changed: name, hairstyle, eye colour, smile, posture; desires, dreams and motivations; feelings, thoughts and dimples.

Somebody became someone who became significant enough to turn the novel around. They usurped my original idea(l) and became the character I’d been struggling to create.

I can sit down for hours and riddle through the people in my book. I can write page after page of details outlining their chronology, their appearance, their habits and their unique features.

I can have hours of conversations with them over a mug of tea and smile at how light, how genuine they are.

I can become best friends with them.

But I can never predict that they will strip off the layers I’ve put there and show me exactly what I’ve been looking for. I can’t control that.

Character development, at its most unconscious, is a creature unto itself. You can be as mechanical as you like but the day will come when a character goes renegade and changes the entire game.

I live for those days because they’re the moments when a character is truly born. They become more real than I could ever have hoped.

Create characters. Be ready for them when they turn up on your doorstep without their masks on. They’ll be the best thing to ever happen to you.

It’s not impossible to write when ill. It’s just unpleasant, results in prolonged sufferings and delays recovery.

But when the words are in the right order on the page? Well, that’s the best treatment. Out of all that misery comes one beautiful, perfect sentence.

• Start with loads of ideas and work them all in
• Don’t give your characters challenges
• Forget about your main character having dreams and desires
• Wing it and write aimlessly
• Put in as many subplots as possible
• Don’t let your characters evolve
• Read nothing whilst you’re writing
• Spend ages seeking the answers to your woes in writing guides
• Keep your heart closed. It’s wrong to have feelings for what you write
• Make the reader do all the work; don’t bother building surroundings
• Give yourself a massive word-count as your final goal
• Don’t make mistakes
• Write every single day for hours on end, without a break
• Compare yourself to your favourite authors
• Never rethink, restart or revive
• Give up

another life by **mog** on Flickr.

(via mortisia)

Investing in Scrivener is probably the best gimmick I’ve ever succumbed to. After setting everything out into chapters, then scenes, and writing notes on the cork board cards, I can see what isn’t working.

There’s a lot that isn’t working. I have a generous amount of ‘nothing’ going on which is covering the fact that I don’t have a complete story to tell, more of a general ‘well, life is so dreary sometimes’ description.

There are people gifted with the ability to narrate. I am not one of those people.

Yesterday I completed a scene in chapter 1 that started to steer me in the direction of a story. All I have to do now is steer the other 40,000 words in the same direction and I’m laughing.

It will involved a lot of deleting though and to be laughing whilst murdering your characters in certain situations - what is that? Insanity, I think.

I’ve been screaming my way through Stephen King’s On Writing and finding that things are making a bit more sense now that I’ve freed myself from the shackles of plot and theme until the next draft.

I was taught to nail those before getting down to writing, which isn’t bad teaching. It’s just not the right teaching for me. My mind is like one of those hoarder homes, a three-storey townhouse with thoughts and dreams and interests and obscure observations everywhere. It’s so packed that it can’t be defined as crammed and to find anything, you have to move dozens of things whilst remembering where they went.

Plotting and working a theme in that mess is impossible.

I’ve turned my attention to situation, as King has insisted, and plonked Faith in a loose one: something is coming for her. Oh shit, now what?

First she has to riddle out what it is that’s coming for her. Then she has to figure out why this is going to be detrimental to her existence. Then she either has to run or get proactive. Maybe she runs, realises the futility and then gets proactive.

But I have a problem. What’s coming after her? Easy, The Boogeyman. That begs the question of why. Well, why else do monsters come after people? To steal and eat them, of course!

Except this Boogeyman isn’t your typical monster but something akin to Hamlet’s dead daddy, the spectral Other which Derrida assures us is coming, will come, and will take a chunk out of us without us ever noticing because this is the one we could never see coming, not in the lifetime of ever.

So what does this thing from the shadows want? And why Faith?

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died when I was a toddler. Yet there is a photo on the bureau of a woman in a bi-plane, of all things. My grandmother swanned about a few times in this machine just before the start of the Second World War. If the picture wasn’t there, I’d dismiss the idea as ridiculous. Surely, that remarkable woman can’t be anything to do with me.

I’ve just traced a story that’s incomplete. I have no idea how it connects me to my grandmother because there are things that have been lost, things that were never said and a deference which separates me from the significance of it. There is otherness in both the photo and the idea. I say idea because even my Dad can’t recall what his headstrong mother got up to before she settled down with his dad and had kids.

I find myself wanting something from it though and I believe that this is what the novel is about.

Everyone wants meaning and significance, don’t they? We want to count. We want a history and a story of our own. But what if all we have are fragments? What if something comes along wanting the missing pieces, too?

What if Faith has something the Boogeyman wants?

I’ve returned to my cluttered dust-heap, which I’ve named ‘Square One’ out of a precious lack of imagination, and found the same question I’ve been posing for months:

What does Faith want.

It’s such a demanding question that it no longer requires a ? and has taken on a declarative air. Now that I’ve dumped Faith in the middle of a family death and threatened her with the Boogeyman, it should become clear, through her reactions, what she wants.

Yeah right.

I’ve created a character who is so unique in her reactions and perspective, even she doesn’t know what she wants. Why? Because she doesn’t understand why she should want anything. At least until I start taking stuff away from her, then she’ll want them back.

In short, I’ve made a too-content character and because she’s a good girl, meekly shown her the naughty corner (threat of this Other coming to get her), and patted her in the head for it.

No wonder I don’t have a story.

My only redeeming insight, which came last week (took its poxy time), is that Faith is unable to read properly due to raging dyslexia and is possibly, walking around with mild autism. This is great because it means she’ll have to read to deal with the Other.

It’s hardly genius, I know, but I needed a problem, I created one and there it is. Faith can’t read properly. It fucks up many an aspect of her life.

Still. No. Story.

I’m going to have to riddle this one out for a spell and in the meantime, try not to delete everything out of despair. All 42,000 words are workable. It’s just a shame I’m not as pliable right now.

Posted with Blogsy

(via mortisia)

mooderino:

A MacGuffin is the thing a character wants. It’s what he sets out to find, hide, build or destroy. Its existence is what drives a story forward.

It was a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock, and the reason he gave it such a silly name is because he believed it didn’t really matter what it was, just as long as it existed and the need it represented was clear.

The important thing is that it’s tangible.  An object, a person, a place. Some thing. If a character wants to be happy, that isn’t a MacGuffin. If he wants to be happy by stealing the Hope Diamond and becoming rich, then the diamond is the MacGuffin.

But you could replace the diamond with any similar object and it would work just as well. The important thing to remember is that it needs to be a thing, not an idea or an attitude.

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(via brian-curry)

It’s impossible.

I suppose that’s the irony I have to sit with if I’m going to write about language and have no idea as to how I should do it.

That’s what you get for creating a ghost.

I spent a few hours last night searching for a decent iPad writing app. I use Pages and Doc2 HD at the moment but they don’t have the same brilliant functionality as MS Word.

And yes, I just went there.

The problem is, they don’t have a built-in, simple ‘don’t have to fiddle with shit’ indent function *scowls*

I came across Scrivener but was disappointed to see that it’s not developed for the iPad (yet) but for Mac and Windows users. Then I got into a reading spat about the tactile nature of writing and how the iPad doesn’t fulfil this writerly need.

The iPad is for consuming and that’s about it. And don’t let them fool you into thinking that those ‘draw / compose / photo edit’ apps are about your creativity. They’re little more than vessels that allow you to consume the illusion that if you actually picked up a pencil to draw, or a sat a piano to play, you’d be any good. They have their entertainment merits.

It’s the same for writing. Apps don’t make you a good writer. The iPad doesn’t make you a good writer. But as a tool for research, it’s useful. The scrapbook apps will never replace a real paper notebook by the way.

Writing is raw, not a ten minute synthetic swipe.

Back to Scrivener. I’m sceptical. But after reading up, downloading it to my netbook (thank you past-self for not selling it, and thank you recent self for upgrading the RAM…) and running through the extensive tutorial, I’m bordering on hopeful.

I said that I was putting Trace aside. Totally true. I packed away all notebooks and files, put every bit of it out of my sight.

And I have sulked so much.

Estuary is unfolding slowly in a new notebook but I can’t bring myself to write it. Trace is a scorned lover and it is leaving carcasses everywhere.

Why do spirits show us horror and death?

Derrida says in Spectres of Marx that ghosts are reminders; they confront us with duty, as the snuffed-out visage of Hamlet’s father did when it demanded justice and vengeance.

Ghosts are difficult to understand and I’m not a medium. What is Trace demanding of me? Not to quit so fast, so soon.

I’ve implanted the manuscript into Scrivener and can already see the benefits of the app. I may well buy it by the time my free trial ends, if it helps me see through the fog.

But just to state very clearly: Scrivener will not replace my notebooks. Those are the things I go to when I’m putting ideas down for the first time. They’re histories. They’re my home.

I took a gimmicky leap with Scrivener because it looks like this could be the thing I need to organise the manuscript. MS Word stopped being useful after 10,000 words, even in separate documents.

I still have no idea how to sort out the problems I’m having with this story but I do know that I need structure to write as much as I need air to breathe.

Scrivener could give me what I need now that everything else has disappeared. Friends, mentors, resources. All gone.

And disappearing was one of my original ideas. What would I do if I could disappear?

We’re all entropic. Words erase us with a joke we can’t detect. What does that mean?

There’s your joke.

And if you find the answer to that one in a blink, the joke is on you.

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